Take Five Creative Embroiderers...

UK Tactile Book Wins Special Award in European Competition

A tactile book for blind children, designed and made by five women in Guildford, has won a special award in the recent European Typhlo and Tactus tactile book competition. Take 5 Fish was much admired by all the sixteen judges, half of them visually-impaired, who met in Dijon, France in November 2006 to choose three winning books from the ninety-two entries from all over Europe.

The Typhlo and Tactus competition, now in its eighth year, aims to promote an improvement in both the quality and the quantity of tactile books available to young visually-impaired children, as well as the sharing of stories from other cultures. Two of the winning books, Rozmanitosti by K. Adamkova from the Czech Republic and Hiiri kissalle räätälinä by Aune Rintala from Finland, will be mass produced and distributed in the member countries at a price heavily subsidised by the European Commission.

This is the first time a book from the UK has won a Typhlo and Tactus Award. Another UK entry, The Mouse and the Lion (based on the Aesop's fable) was also shortlisted.

Unlike the other two winning books, Take 5 Fish is a fabric book, designed and sewn by Jenny Ashford, Betty Lardner, Jane Cobbett, Brenda Fox and Deirdre Scott with text by Ada Carrott. The pages are made of fabric with the text added in print and in braille. The illustrations involve a wide variety of different textures, as well as contrasting colours and reflective materials to stimulate children with a small amount of sight. Each page of the book involves the child in a counting game, with fish to be found in hiding places behind rocks, in shells or in fishing nets. The judges especially admired the interactive nature of the book, as well as the extraordinary variety of textures achieved with different materials and sewing techniques.

The five women met at an adult education class whilst studying for City and Guilds qualifications in Creative Embroidery and have since exhibited their work in the Guildford area, where they have become known as 'Take Five'. They are all members of the Guildford branch of the Embroiderers' Guild, as well as another local group, the Wey Valley Workshop.

Take 5 Fish has now been donated to the ClearVision Project, a postal lending library of over 14,000 children's books in print and braille. ClearVision lends adapted children's books to over a thousand schools, public libraries and families all over the UK so that they can be shared by visually-impaired and sighted children and adults. Registered as a national charity in 1992, over the past six years ClearVision has built up an additional loans collection of nearly a thousand hand-made tactile books - one of only three such collections worldwide. Most of these tactile books have been made and donated by volunteers.

For more information about this year's Typhlo and Tactus competition, the winning book and its designers, or the ClearVision library, please contact Marion Ripley, 020 8789 9575 info@clearvisionproject.org.